Details,details,details

craypas and depression and writing

Photo by Vitor Machado on Unsplash

Let me tell you about craypas, they are oil based pastels shaped like crayons. It turns out they’ve been around forever. So have I, but I only discovered them three days ago. I can’t remember how I found them. I badly needed something to do because I haven’t been able to write. Writing is what makes me feel alive. Even more important, writing makes me glad to be alive. Without it, there’s no point to being me. I had grown despondent, you could almost say I missed myself. So on the spur of the moment, out of desperation and excitement, I bought a box of twenty-five different colored craypas, and a pad of drawing paper. Black drawing paper. I didn’t want yet another, and even somewhat bigger, blank white page.

But now let me tell you about black. It begs for any bright color in the box. It is more than ready for whatever you can give it. So out of a boxfull of color, you choose one that can hold its own on black. Maybe a nice bright blue? Pick it up and your hand can make any shape at all it wants to. Maybe you make a bright blue roundish scallopy shape and watch it turn instantly into the beginnings of a flower. In no time you have maybe fifteen roundish scallopy shapes scattered all over the page. Big and small, very big and very small.

Now choose a nice purple to put inside one of the shapes you made. Purple is a darker color, but it shows up in contrast to your bright blue outline. Filling it in perfectly is not necessary when you’re working on black, black is both eager and forgiving. You can just scribble in little bursts of purple, and bingo! You’ve got a really nice flower! Keep going, fill in every outline with purple, then connect every flower to every other flower with a bright green stem wandering in and out like a huge vine or something. You can even put tiny leaves on it. Then you gaze fondly at your work and realize you have designed a shower curtain.

But it doesn’t depress you, it makes you smile. And another thing. Unlike writing, it look even better from a distance.

I can compare this to writing. I’m new at craypas, and I do this to please myself. Ditto writing. It is exciting every time I begin a new piece. Ditto writing. What will this turn into? Who knows. Not you. Not yet. Again, ditto writing. Maybe nothing at all but I keep going out of curiosity. Exactly like writing. You are drawn to something—an idea, or an event, or a scrap of conversation, some odd detail, and you start to fiddle with it. Kind of like doodling but doodling with a purpose.

Then yesterday I bought a shallow bowl carved out of stone. Undetectable at first, carved up by the rim, is a tiny stone frog. It has been trying to get out. One leg is drawn up, the other is extended, pushing. When I saw it in Rose, the antique store in town, I fell in love and I bought it. I fell in love so deeply that at first I wanted it buried with me, which was crazy. This should never be buried, and I don’t know if that’s what I want either. I want to be disposed of the way some of the earliest settlers here did, laid atop a high structure deep in the woods, where I would provide sustenance for the wild creatures who find me there, birds, of course, and anything that can climb. That’s how I’d like to disappear. Being of use.

So here I am, describing a stone frog, when suddenly I’m on the brink of what to do with my dead body. I’m not going to write about that. At least not now.. I want to keep looking at this tiny creature wanting to get up and out and into whatever comes next. Also, I’m in the middle of making another tree and the new craypas were on the porch this morning, with a million different shades of green.

Forty years ago the husband of a friend of mine said something I didn’t understand. I knew at the time it was wise and true and important, but I just didn’t get it. I didn’t get it, but I never forgot it. “Suffering is the finest teacher. It teaches you details.” His words have cropped up from time to time over the years, but I still have never understood them. They showed up in my head a few days ago, along with the craypas. And just this minute I think I finally get it. An interpretation, if only for myself.

And it is something I knew without knowing it. It’s about curiosity. Depressed or in gear, it’s the small things that attract. Small things. The ordinary seen through a different lens. It was so simple. Maybe I learned about this first from depression. I don’t remember. But it became a habit.

It’s like this. Suffering arrives and you have no defense, no definition, you have no edges, there is no refuge. You are fertile ground where nothing is growing, you are unused and you are useless. But at any given moment, your eye might fasten on some odd detail, the tiny legs of a struggling creature, the designs frost forms on your window, a bunch of color in a box. And as your gaze lingers, that tiny almost sacred thing whatever it will be, takes root, suggesting that you look more closely, allowing you to make something out of it. You can use whatever is handy. A box of craypas would be fun. Give that a shot. Then you can write about it.

Or you can smile. You can cry. I love being alive again.